Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions CD sound better than DVD! How come?

I suspect it is/was a cultural thing. The Japanese market places a value on quality recordings. In the days when recordings were more often pressed in the market they were sold in you would see differences from market to market. The reason they started showing up in North America is that a small percentage of the population also valued that quality and someone could sell enough to make some money from the transaciton.

These days everything comes from a giant factory somewhere, so the same disc is just put into a localized jewel case.

That’s not the case with all recordings especially for artists local to the country. None of my German or Japanese CD are the same as similar titles I purchased in the U.S. The U.S. versions are almost always Anglicized with some or many of the native language tracks replaced by English versions or different tracks altogether. In most cases the mastering on the foreign (to the U.S.) CDs are “mastered” (I realize not the same specs.) on par with a comparable U.S. SACD. Though many (local to the U.S.) bands do produce high quality CD masters for the U.S. market too.

Now I'm curious. I wonder if the big labels do things differently from smaller labels.

I never checked to see if the they were recessed by the same labels here in the U.S. as overseas. Got called into work so no time to check right now.